I was called into a world-famous Hollywood recording studio to tune and "voice" the 20-year-old Yamaha CF concert grand; I'd never set foot in the studio or seen the piano. It was a jazz session, an up- and-coming singer, Janis Mann, with a bunch of legendary monsters playing on the date: Peter Erskine, Roy Purdy, Joe LaBarbera (drums); Chuck Berghofer and John Clayton (bass); Tamir Hendelman (piano, arranger) and Diane Schur (vocals, piano). Friday 8AM---the direction was to tune it and spend one more hour "voicing," which means, in reality, "whatever you can do to make it sound and feel better and more friendly to the player and the microphones." The piano was essentially on pitch---nice---but the action was nasty: shallow, noisy, never regulated, the hammers with fairly deep, 12mm-long string cuts, so the tone was pinched, metallic, harsh, and quick-decaying. When I plucked strings, the piano sang like a bird---there was something beautiful in there. What to do in an hour, and I mean 60 minutes maximum? 1. Removed the action, unscrewed the felt-covered action rest block on the left side of the action cavity, placed .75mm hard cardboard shims behind, and remounted the rest block, in effect shifting the entire action to the right between .5 and 1 mm at rest: new felt. Greatly improved sustain, much stronger fundamentaI and lower partials. I calculated how far to shim the action by trial and error, using my eyes to watch the hammers and using the shift pedal, using my ears as the final arbiter on test notes in each section. I then readjusted the action frame stop screw on the inside of the treble cheekblock 1 mm farther in to compensate for the change in the rest block position. 2. With the Pianotek shank flange hammer alignment tool, I made slight tonal adjustments, especially in octave 5 and 6, by slight movement of the hammer's left-to-right position. 3. Most of the action noise was coming from the squeaking knuckles, and the "popping jacks," a noise that occurs when the edge of the jack is way behind the knuckle core---in other words, when the felt on the regulation button has compressed, and the action has been unregulated over thousands of hours of play. So I removed the action, regulated an agressive (slightly toward the player) jack position and worked powdered Teflon into the knuckles. The repetition springs weren't bad; I strengthened maybe 12 notes. 4. I quickly raised the hammerline 1mm throughout the piano, and picked up a nice little aftertouch. 5. The player complained of "sharpness; are the notes in the treble tuned sharp?" Not technically; the piano dictated a mild stretch to achieve beatless triple octaves---but because of the neglect of the piano, there were all kinds of shrieks, ghosts, and space monkeys coming from the top two octaves. The fix? I pulled the last two octaves down a bit, say slightly flat on the triple octave, maybe a 6-8 cent change, and with a needle broke through the lacquer crust some idiot burdened those hammers with at some point, then shoved the action back in, Tamir tried it---and a smile came on the piano player's face. OK. Then he left to rehearse with the singer, and Bill Smith, veteran record producer and engineer, asked me to play the thing some so he could dial in a sound. I did, and within 3 or 4 minutes he said over the talkback system "Yeah, man, s**t, that sounds great" with a relieved and happy lilt in his voice, and I knew I was a battlefield triage hero one more time. Whew. And just 5 minutes to spare. The beauty of the "voicing," the slight shifting of the action's rest position, is that for the next rock band that comes in and says, "dude, the piano's too mellow," all it takes is 5 minutes to remove the shims, reregulate the una corda travel, and bingo! Instant trashy, smashy, tinkling and crashy, nasty, nasty tone. Which is why I hardly ever tune in studios these days; very few let me maintain the instrument properly, even with me "nagging," teaching, and showing the difference, so I pass. That's why I'm putting a piano of mine in a beautiful old studio recently taken over by an artisanal, very successful recording engineer and producer: we'll have a great, reasonable, good-vibe studio, world-class mikes and gear, with our great piano in it. Attractive? I think so. Have a great Sunday, everyone. We're working on an amazing surprise or two for Kansas City....stay tuned. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/pianotech.php/attachments/20070429/9f242c2e/attachment.html
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